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Posts tagged with the category Organizational Ethics

98104: Responsiveness, and Why We Don't Have It

In this country, citizens across a broad spectrum of diverse backgrounds don’t often come together over a cause. We just don’t organize much anymore. Our rights and liberties were bought and fought for some time ago. Or so we think –
We expect our water and electricity to just work. We expect to easily cross neighborhood...

Listening to Find the Truth Within, A Corporate Leader's Story

Tom was born in the mid-sixties in a family of small self-made entrepreneurs. His destiny had to be to continue the family business, to potentially bring it to its next level of development. The family understood that for that to happen, Tom would have to complete engineering studies. This is where he would successfully learn...

Will Cyborgs Ever Learn to Pray?

One morning last week, I awoke from a strange dream. I don’t recall all the particulars, but it involved a scene where I was living and working with a group of “not-quite-human” creatures made of silicone, integrated circuits and bio-engineered, synthetic flesh. These engineered creatures seemed to have acquired human-like...

Listen for a Change

As I write this post, I am in Mexico City having just spent the day with a group of mid-career managers facilitating a program about how to have more productive conversations at work. I cannot say for sure what the participants got from today’s session, but I definitely walked away with some food for thought.
The fact that today’s...

A New Era for the Practice of Organization Development

It has been a little over 45 years since the term Organization Development (OD) was first used in print to refer to that distinctive profession and consulting practice which aims to help organizations become more effective by means of systematic interventions focusing on organizational culture, processes and structure. During its short...

Mainstream Mindfulness

The Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program developed by Jon Kabat Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School is now a global phenomenon with programs running in every continent. Mindfulness studies conducted from the school’s Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, and involving over 20,000...

Systems thinking and courage

In all the books and research papers on systems thinking that I have read, I don't think I have yet found the word courage as part of the language used. There is a lot written about systems thinking in terms of it's relevance and importance, it's theories and methodologies, but nothing about what it takes--emotionally. And I'm...

Can teams be treated as artifacts? Can they be treated as an individual?

During a recent business trip, I asked a couple of my colleagues if teams had their own subjectivity distinguishable from the subjectivity of their members. I’d just finished reading an article by Fred Kofman in which the author made the case that teams and organizations are “artifacts” and not true “holons.” For now...

The complexity of wealth and happiness

As reported in the Wall Street Journal (Curran, 2013), Australia has been ranked the happiest industrialized country in the world for the third year in a row, according to the Better Life Index of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That puts it ahead of Sweden, Canada, Norway, and Switzerland...

Befriending Variability

The Ethicist column appears weekly in the New York Times Sunday magazine. The current “ethicist,” Chuck Klosterman has taken over for Randy Cohen, who wrote the column for 12 years. People write in to The Ethicist with thorny, modern problems raising questions about the right thing to do. Cohen collected some of his favorite questions...

On Making Choices and Moral Courage

The fall 2012 semester has begun and the organizational systems and human science students are well into their journey exploring ethical issues that arise in organizations and society.
The open and honest conversations have been very engaging and challenging causing all to stop and ponder the thoughtful insights developed, their practical...

Ethical Systems as Analytical Lenses

While not unexpected, the economic crisis and the financial industry are back in the news as the LIBOR scandal. It seems that only the “tip of the iceberg” has been revealed about a severely misguided global economic system and the business leaders, philosophies, strategies and practices that created it continue to keep it operating....